Exploring Italy’s Monte Arsiccio Mine: Part 2 - Surprises On The Surface & Underground

This sprawling abandoned mine kept giving as I went along, coming across another adit, a funicular, more mining equipment and more buildings to explore... Unfortunately, I also came across some pictures online that seemed to confirm my concern that I missed something at this mine due to the tangle of blackberry bushes. It wasn’t entirely clear since they mixed several mine sites together, but I came across a blog post from some Italian explorers that seemed to show an adit - with some ore carts inside - to the left of the upper and lower adits that I located and explored. The Italians indicated that it was not large and it may have been less overgrown when they visited, but I am still kicking myself for missing it (if I understood their material correctly).
I would imagine that the lower adit I explore in this video connects somewhere to the workings accessed from the upper adit, but I was not able to confirm that as sections in both adits were inaccessible. The upper adit obviously utilized the LHD that we located and so, I suspect, that was where the most recent work took place. However, given the green plastic roofing inside of this lower adit, it can’t be THAT old.
Really, given the evolution of this mine and its long life, it is difficult to tell when they worked certain parts of it and when they used some of the equipment as well as how everything worked together.
For example, although rail led out from that upper adit, there was no rail inside of it. There are older and newer workings in the upper adit and they must have, at least, used rail when they were extracting minerals in the older workings. So, it seems that they removed the rail inside in favor of the LHD. So, did the LHD come out and load ore directly into carts outside? That doesn’t seem particularly efficient if that is the case. It might be that they dropped everything down to the lower haulage adit given the large waste rock pile and the ore bin down there. However, there was also an ore bin and tram station connected to the upper adit. Perhaps these were connected to the older workings in the upper adit?
It is tough to determine the answers to these types of questions at times.
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You can click here for the full playlist of abandoned mines: goo.gl/TEKq9L
Thanks for watching!
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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them - nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.
These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We have fun doing it! This is exploring history firsthand - bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.
So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!
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